


I only have eyes for you

by yathrin



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: A certain future cameo will be tagged when it appears, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Relationships, Consensual Underage Sex, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Homicide, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Partners in Crime, Robot/Human Relationships, Teen Angst, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Underage Sex, if androids count as people that is, kind of, no beta we die like men, robot gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-01 22:46:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15783672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yathrin/pseuds/yathrin
Summary: It's been years since the night that changed the lives of a deviant android and the kid he swore to protect forever. Emma is now seventeen and what she believed to be a chaste, family-brand love has started blossoming into something else, but everything she gets from Daniel is rejection, doubts and an impermeable fence warding off secrets left unsaid. How can she convince Daniel that she's no longer a helpless little girl? How will the uncovering of the truth he's so hardly struggled to keep from her affect their bond?And... how longer can Daniel deny what he really aches for?





	1. Chapter 1

_“Okay, it’s recording! This is Daniel, the coolest Android in the world! Say hi, Daniel!”_

A warm afternoon. Sunbeams filter through the dancing autumn leaves in the park. There’s the distant sound of children laughing nearby, but it’s muzzled, as if she were underwater.

_“Hello!”_

_“You’re my bestie! We’ll always be together!”_

A chilly night. Water is already boiling in the pot on the stove, but nobody’s going to fetch it. The shouts are drowned out by gunshots that burst in the kitchen and make her eardrums sting. There’s blood pooling on the floor. Strong hands grip her arms and wipe her tears, leaving a trail of red and blue over her cheeks.

_“We’ll always be together.”_

<< >> 

**Now, 2045**

The girl wakes up having broken into a cold sweat sometime during the night. It’s dark and her eyes take some time to adjust to the dimness of the room but she can make out a lean figure coming close.

“Is it the nightmare again?”

Her frantic gasps for air must have alerted him -she doesn’t want to think he was scanning her in her sleep. It cost her more than a handful of fights, but he stopped doing that a couple of years ago. Most nights she’s certain he’s holding his promise and that’s already an achievement.

 It _is_ the nightmare again, indeed, although she doesn’t like to call it that way. The morning she decided it would be the last time she cried in her sleep, she started referring to it as the recurring dream, the bad dream and later on, ‘that fucker’ (for which she was promptly scolded).

“I’m fine, Daniel,” she rubs her eyes with the ball of her wrists. “How long until breakfast?”

Daniel’s concerned frown lightens up a bit. “Considering it’s only six AM, I’d say a good while. Unless you want to get up now and make it yourself.”

“Ugh.”

The winter sun is still hiding and the sky is dark but sleepiness has abandoned Emma and it won’t be coming back any soon. She stretches her back and arms, her loose white top lifting up to reveal her tiny navel. Then she breaks into a smile and extends her hands so that Daniel will pull her up and out of the sheets. She flinches slightly when her bare feet touch the cold tiles of the floor.

Soon the sizzling of pancake dough searing on a pan fills the whole apartment, which isn’t a difficult task to accomplish considering its tiny size; two small bedrooms opposite from each other, a bathroom at the end of the hallway and an open kitchen-dining room with no separation between it and the modest living room. It lays at the top of the six-storey building and because of that, it also has exclusive access to the attic, a dusty old place Emma hasn’t set foot in for years. It’s all a housekeeper model android and his seventeen-year-old ward can afford, and definitely enough for them to live comfortably, if not lavishly. After barely five years after they moved in, she holds dear every mold spot, every scratch on the wall and even the rattling of the old pipework.

Emma flips the golden pancakes with ease and serves them on a plate with honey while Daniel puts a dash of cream in her coffee mug. She’s been drinking coffee for over two years now, despite the android’s best efforts. The girl likes it bitter, sharp, contrasting with the sickly sweetness of the things she usually drinks it with. Meanwhile, Daniel checks the news on the small tv that hangs from the wall.

“You’re going out later today, right?” she asks after taking a sip.

“Yes.”

“To _work_.”

Daniel takes his time to answer. “Yes.”

Emma likes to tease him about whatever it is he does to keep the money coming in but won’t ever speak about. She suspects it’s nowhere near what a decent, law-abiding citizen would enjoy, but she couldn’t care less about law-abiding citizens and their petty rules on what they deem worthy. She and Daniel spent too much time in the gutter for her to believe that good things come only if you wait for them.

Still, Daniel, with his long, square jaw and beautiful but glum eyes, refuses to give her any details. Usually he’ll disappear early in the evening and be back by midnight. Other times everything is delayed and he stumbles into the apartment in the early hours of the morning, often looking beaten up and even hurt. It’s mostly scratches and some small pool of thirium under his synthetic skin that gets reabsorbed quickly, nothing like the bruises Emma gets every now and then that linger on for days, swollen and hurting, and which Daniel likes to kiss ‘to chase the pain away’. He’s never showed up with a grave injury, one that would endanger his normal functioning, but with each day that goes by, the possibility of him being wounded becomes increasingly heart-wrenching for Emma.

“Can I tag along?”

Daniel, who until now has been more or less focused on the news channel, flinches almost unnoticeably, but his eyes remain fixed on the screen. Emma’s memory is far from android-perfect, but the last time she asked to accompany him on whatever endeavour he was up to, she was fourteen and a heated argument followed, which she predictably lost.

“You already know the answer, dear.”

Any other day that should have been the end of it. But there’s a special kind of warmth prickling at Emma’s gut whenever he uses a term of endearment to address her, and she’s feeling especially playful today.

“Oh, pleeeease…” she cocks her head to a side, like a kitten. Seeing it has no effect on her guardian, she stands up -she’s done with breakfast anyway- and puts herself between the tv and its composed audience, fists on both side of her waist so that Daniel is forced to divert his gaze at her. He doesn’t say anything, and she resorts to using her last card. She crouches and rests her chin in the hollow between Daniel’s knees, looking up at him from below her long eyelashes.

It seems he didn’t expect that, for his brows go upwards slightly and the tiniest of smiles curves his thin lips. He runs his slender fingers through her hair without saying anything.

“You’ll have to tell me some day, you know,” she mutters in a dreary voice.

Daniel stops stroking her hair and lifts her chin up with his hand.

“Surely,” he answers gently. “But not today.”

The two pair of blue eyes stare at each other for what seems to be ages. Though their colour might be similar, they couldn’t be more vastly different. Hers, bright and both candid and tinted with a impish playfulness; his, caring and tender, overcast with a certain duskiness. Emma thinks about how those beautiful irises of his will never wither or be framed by wrinkles; she knows for a fact he can cry because it’s been engraved in her memories but it’s been years since the last and only time she saw him give in and weep. Those unfathomable wells that haunt her even when they’re nowhere to be seen.

For a moment, she swears Daniel was about to say something, but a loud thunder roars outside and startles her, shattering the atmosphere. Emma wishes he hadn’t removed the LED that used to glow on his right temple. It would make it easier for her to discern what’s going on in the poised man’s mind. The android gets up, careful to help her up too.

“I’ll clean this up.” He sounds eager to change the subject. Emma raises one of her eyebrows.

“You don’t have to, I can do it…” She doesn’t particularly enjoy doing chores but she feels compelled to, if only because it gives her the impression of being responsible and useful, and maybe also because…

“I don’t mind,” Daniel reassures her. As always, it’s like he can read her like an open book. “Not because it’s in my original program. It’s because I like to take care of our home, of you.”

 _Nailed it_. It makes her uncomfortable to some extent to see Daniel act like the mindless cleaning drone he was designed to be. Nevertheless, he’s managed to guess it right and after he hits her with his honesty she lets out a resigned exhalation, trying to hide her bashfulness at his words.

“Okay. I’m gonna take a shower.”

She can feel Daniel’s eyes pinned on her back as she heads towards the bathroom. She mumbles under her breath as she undresses, wishing he would put his mind-reading abilities to use on her heart. Perhaps it’d help her understand why, as of lately, his soothing hands cause her to shiver at their very touch, why it is that she has less trouble falling asleep when comforted by his embrace. Why her feet seem to hover over the ground when he calls her name and smiles at her from the other side of a room.

The water starts raining down on her and she places her hand over her chest, trying to steady the racing beat that hammers against it.

<< >>

Daniel pushes the bathroom’s half open door with his foot and enters. The air is humid and clouded by the steam that comes out from the shower enclosure, where the fresh sound of water hitting against hard tiles and soft skin can be heard along with a low humming. He glances around and his software registers a list of what’s to be done in there. Open the window – it can wait until Emma comes out-, put the personal care objects lying on the sink back on the glass shelves at the side, pick up the small pile of dirty laundry that rests inside a basket on a corner, as well as the clothes Emma has taken off before showering that have fallen in front of the shower stall. Daniel proceeds to do all of those things with the expertise that’s engraved in his core programming and the skilfulness that years of practice have given him.

As he’s bent over the soiled clothes, the water stops running and the shower screen slides open and the sudden sound and movement make him turn his head.

“Oh,” Emma is a bit startled by his presence in front of her. She pulls down the towel that hangs nearby and wraps it around her slim figure with no sign of distress of embarrassment -it’s not like the android hasn’t seen all of her since she was very little. He even used to bath her when she was younger and they still lived in the Phillips’ household. This shouldn’t be any different.

However, Daniel’s eyes get a glimpse of a pink, round nipple and a hint of dark hair below her stomach, and whips his head to look away immediately, busying his system with tidying up the rest of the misty room -only there isn’t much left to do.

“I’d like a change,” Emma twists a strand of damp brown hair around her pinkie. She’s staring at the mirror above the sink with her head tilted to a side.

“Change? I bet you’ve already thought of something,” Daniel says while he picks up the rest of the discarded clothes on the floor, thirium already rushing a little less wildly in his vessels.

“A haircut, for example.”

Daniel finally looks at her and runs a simulation that overlays a variety of shorter hairstyles over her delicate features. “It would be nice,” he agrees. It would make her look older, more mature to a degree. An intrusive image of pink, wet skin appears in his interface. He shuts it down right away.

“I don’t know of any good places to go have it done, though,” her brow knits. “Can you look it up? Somewhere near.”

The android straightens his back and his eyelids flutter briefly. In a matter of a few seconds he’s already got the address of three different hairdressers within a two-mile radius and another a little further with very good reviews, but something stops him from telling her outright. He feels a familiar sting of apprehension when he thinks of her slender silhouette walking the cold streets, steering clear of the rest of passer-by’s and looking both ways before crossing the busy lanes. He doesn’t like it when she goes out alone.

“I could do it here,” he stutters. _So you don’t have to leave._

Emma bites her lower lip. He’s done it somewhat frequently all these years now, if sloppily and quick, resulting in an uneven, untamed mane that has grown way past her shoulder blades. He’s never attempted anything more sophisticated than that.

“I’m already downloading the necessary protocols to do it properly,” he adds and unwittingly pulls a chuckle out of her.

“Okay,” she nods enthusiastically. The towel drops a little below her armpit and she pulls it back up while looking at him, visibly amused.

Daniel breathes out in relief. He thought she would persist on wanting to go. Lately, she’s been looking for any excuse to get out of the apartment: getting groceries, going to the cinema. Daniel understands -she’s young, she’s blooming, she’s curious about the world. Some of those he lets her do on her own, although most of the time he offers to go along, but he can’t keep her on a leash forever. He knows she’ll ask about his ‘job’ again. _It’s too soon,_ he still tells himself. _She’s just a girl, naïve and over-confident._ Distressing past memories make their way into his mind, running, tripping, comforting. Fingers soiled with the unmentionable. Years on the run, sheltering her from, well, everything, under his wing have made him somewhat… overzealous when it comes to her safety, as she’s jokingly remarked more than once. If those remarks have been turning bitter recently, he’s tried to ignore it. It’s fine by him. He knows sometimes he goes too far but he can’t help it. The reason he deviated, the reason their life is the way it is, is after all his primary directive; it has been since he can remember.

_> >Emma Phillips (b. 09/02/2028)_

_> >Relationship status: Family_

_> > Directive:_

      >> _Protect Emma_

 

  **Then, 2038**

“Found you!” Emma chuckles, pulling a big cardboard box out of her way. To her disappointment, there’s no one under this one either. She sighs and looks around the storage room. Her frustration doesn’t last very long: before she knows it, two slender but strong arms have swiped her off the floor and she finds herself thrown up in the air.

“No, I found you!” she hears Daniel say, and they both break into a peal of laughter. He ruffles her hair and puts her down on, kneeling so his eyes are at the same height as hers.

“Now it’s time for you to finish your homework before dinner, okay?”

Emma gives him the pouty lip. “Can’t we play just another round? Just one!”

Daniel’s LED flashes yellow as he runs some calculations. It’s Thursday the 12th. John should have come back from work about one hour and fifteen minutes ago but he hasn’t. He’s always in a foul mood on this kind of days when he ‘works overtime’, a claim that Daniel’s software finds has insufficient evidence to be considered truthful after the last months. The android winces, anticipating the scene.

“We can’t. Your father will be arriving soon and you know how serious he is about homework,” he pouts his upper lip as well in an attempt to mask his concern and relieve Emma’s. But the girl is too smart to fall for it. As soon as she realizes what he means, her eyebrows drop into a serious expression.

“Okay, Daniel.”

Emma leaves for her room and the housekeeper android stays in the storage to clean up. He picks up all the cardboard boxes he and the kid have turned into forts and caves and places them neatly one on top of the other, and sweeps the packaging foam that has fallen from some of them. When he’s done, he walks up to the door and checks the storage room once more with his program. Everything is in place, except for one crate that is outlined in yellow before his scrutinizing blue eyes.

Upon closer inspection, the crate is different from the rest of boxes with Christmas decorations and old furniture, and bigger as well. If his software can’t sort it out into a category, he can’t put it in its proper place. His program spurs him to pry it open and sift through its contents.

He blinks, trying to think of a place in the storage room where all of those android limbs and biocomponents should go.

There’s a stark white plastic forearm with wires sticking out from where it should be joined to the elbow, a single optical unit coloured brown and several thirium pumps that look worn out. None of them are compatible with Daniel’s body, or else he would put them beside his own spare parts, which are stored in the kitchen in case one of them breaks down. Not that they would be useful, anyway -they show dents, scratches and other signs of heavy use. He also sees a small plastic bag filled with red-ish crystals of a substance Daniel can’t identify.

His visual interface turns red at the edges and an alarm window pops up with no warning message attached. Daniel’s software is telling him something’s wrong, but his self-diagnosis tests can’t find any fault in his functions.

He drops the thirium pump he’s been holding with a startle as he hears John’s voice at his back.

“What are you doing, Daniel?”

The android turns to look at his owner. His wrinkled forehead is lined with sweat and he sports deep dark circles under his eyes, which dart from Daniel’s face to the open crate. Then all the blood drains from his face.

“Leave that. I said leave that!”

Within a couple of strides he’s onto Daniel and pushes him in the chest harshly, steering him away from the crate. The android freezes in place; the infuriated man quickly covers the crate with its lid and then glowers at him from over his shoulder.

“What are you looking at, you dumb piece of plastic. Go to the kitchen and do something useful.”

Daniel’s legs ignore his commands of movement. John covers the small distance between them until he’s barely an inch apart the composed features of the android. His eyes are bloodshot and his teeth, bare.

“I said leave. And…”

John grabs Daniel’s collar. “You’ve seen nothing, and don’t tell anyone about it. That’s an order. Or I’ll turn you into scrap and sell you in pieces to the highest bidder.”

The mechanical system of his lower body finally responds and Daniel leaves the storage room, the red warning signs cluttering the sides of his interface. He closes them one by one and sends a signal to his pump regulators to slower down the pace at which they send the thirium flowing through his body.

_> > Keep John’s secret_

The command strikes him as odd. Not because it is an illogical request, which it definitely isn’t -not that he’s competent to judge- but because of the internal signal of conflict with another protocol. One he can’t quite put his finger on.

When he arrives at the kitchen, he sees Caroline smoking a cigarette empty-eyed and aloof. Emma’s lurched over the table gripping a pencil, her tiny knuckles gone white. The piece of paper beneath her is blank, save for several wet spots that had darkened its surface.

Daniel senses his fingers tremble.

_^ Software instability ^_

 

**Now, 2045**

The metallic clack of the scissors as they cut through thick strands of hair sounds loud in the silent kitchen -the bathroom has no room for the two of them to be comfortable, so Emma’s sitting on a tall stool, holding a small mirror in her hand and Daniel is standing behind her, calculating every snap of his fingers carefully. He takes each strand as if it could turn to dust at his touch, then cuts it and leaves it to fall to the floor, where several small piles of it have started to pool around his feet. Each time his knuckles graze her neck as they brush her hair aside so it doesn’t get in the way of the part he’s working on, he feels the girl shiver. He shrugs the strange feeling he gets as well, some turmoil that makes his innermost circuits buzz, and keeps cutting.

“Shorter,” her voice takes on a bold undertone.

“As you say, milady.” All he sees is a glimpse of one of her big blue eyes in the small mirror. It’s angled so that she can see what he’s doing at her back and she observes attentively the whole time. Daniel tries not to divert his attention to the reflection of her intense gaze and focuses on the task at hand.

By the time he’s done, Emma’s hair falls about three inches above her shoulders, leaving her long neck exposed. Daniel can see her backbones stick out, pale bumps standing between her shoulder blades. His fingertips reach for the nape of her neck, where her hairline ends, out of their own volition, and then falter. As soon as Daniel realizes, he closes both hands into a fist and forces them down.

“Done,” he forces himself to sound cheerful and nonchalant, and turns the stool around to see the result.

Emma’s face seems to glow. A couple of stray shorter tufts frame her forehead at each side and her eyes look the liveliest he’s seen.

“Oh, Daniel, I love it! It’s just like I imagined it -only better!”

She runs her fingers through it, turning her head side to side to have a better look at the mirror, then her vibrant gaze trains on him.

“Do _you_ like it?” she bites her lower lip.

The android takes a few seconds to gather his thoughts and condense them into a sentence that comes out as a stutter. “You look lovely.” _And I’m an idiot_.

Emma tilts her head back and smiles down at him and god, she does look stunning with her shorter hair matching the chestnut colour of the freckles under her blue eyes.

An alarm rings in Emma’s bedroom, indicating it’s time for her online lessons -used to being home-schooled during childhood and wanting to remain low profile as they always have, Daniel and Emma agreed on keeping the custom throughout her high school years as well, a decision she’s never given any signs of regretting. She’s never been the extroverted type, has she?

She exits the kitchen whistling and hopping slightly down the hallway, leaving Daniel to clean up and sweep the cut hair from the floor. He’s about to throw them all in the trashcan but he hesitates.

His mechanical fingers pick up a compact strand carefully, and brings it up to his nostrils. Housekeeper and caretaker models had odour recognition incorporated into their systems for all kinds of purposes such as noticing toxic substances and gas leaks or getting their owner’s preferences regarding smells and flavours right, but they weren’t designed to develop a taste for any of them, and didn’t really think of them as pleasant or dislikeable until they became deviant and started associating them with their emotions and life experiences. After these years, Daniel knows exactly what kind of smells he likes, and one of them has to be this one -the vanilla-rose-scented shampoo that Emma favours over all others.

He can’t bring himself to throw it away with the rest. Instead, his unerring mechanical fingers pick out a single hair to carefully tie it around the lot to keep it together. Then, he puts it in one of his pockets and, later, it will go to one of the drawers in his bedroom where he also keeps a handful of Emma’s baby teeth, old drawings and beaded bracelets she used to wear when she was younger.

The strand of rich mahogany hair is more precious to him than a reel of threaded gold.

<< >>

Homeless androids are a common sight all over the country, especially in highly industrialized and urban areas where their use as labour was the most widespread. After the revolution, thousands of them, now freed from their chains, many of them having escaped from their homes or workplaces, have found nowhere to go. The high human unemployment rates together with the residual anti-android sentiment leaves them roaming aimlessly, the impossibility of renewing their biocomponents making the sight of inanimate bodies in the slums a common one. Any android knows to steer away from certain neighbourhoods at certain times, lest they become an easy target for illegal scrap dealers, slave traffickers and scavengers.

But Daniel isn’t afraid of prowling those dark corners of the city, he hasn’t been for years. While he keeps his keen senses sharp and alert, he jumps over rusty wired fences and slides down muddy slopes to reach places no sane man or android would reach by their own will.

Except those who go there to die.

Daniel skulks off into a maze of rusty abandoned containers, battered cars and domestic appliances that have seen better days. An ominous cemetery for electronic things, one where his feet struggle to keep their balance while stepping on rotten tires and a sea of wires that cling to his clothes like doomed souls pleading for a second chance. In a way, Daniel goes there to give it to them.

The android rummages through the mechanical waste and puts some of the things he finds inside a bag made of cloth that hangs from his right shoulder. There’s not much that he finds useful, just the usual garbage -a few spare parts here and there, a piece of chassis that’s mostly intact, a special type of screw used in biocomponents, that sort of thing. But Daniel’s eyes are swiping his surroundings in search for something far more valuable. After a while, his sensors notice a faint glow in the distance. A sloppy zoom-in after (it takes him a bit longer than it used to to adapt to the dying sunlight), he straightens his back up from his lurching position and readies his reflex systems.

He approaches the dim blue light that flickers erratically between a pile of discarded car engines and a big metal crate, footsteps as light and cautious as he manages over the wet soil. Soon he has a full picture of the owner of the flashing LED and he scans it from a distance.

The burn marks and blackened chassis makes it difficult to make out his features, but he is a male android, no doubt, with a straight nose and some strands of dark artificial hair still on his head. The left part of his lower jaw is barely hanging from its hinge and the eye above it is missing, leaving instead a gaping black hole where it ought to be. The synthetic skin covers only patches of his neck and torso, which appears to be stuck between thick wires and pipes. How his LED remains a calm blue, Daniel thinks, is a complete mystery. Perhaps the android is in such a malfunctioning state the light on his temple has glitched as well. In any case, he doesn’t pose a threat. Daniel takes some more steps towards him - _it_ , it’s an it- until he enters its field of vision.

The damaged android jerks his -its- head side to side. It must be struggling to see Daniel, if it can see anything at all.

“Who’s there?”

The voice that comes out of its disjointed mouth is clipped and distorted. Daniel stays silent. The android’s LED has flashed yellow for a moment, meaning it still reflects its owner’s estate to some extent. That makes its calmness all the more bizarre.

“I have deactivated my pressure receptors. Please finish me off quickly,” he - _it_ , god damn it- says, remarkably steady despite the warping in its vocal programming. The words take Daniel by surprise but he doesn’t flinch. He’s done this hundreds of times and he would do it all over again.

“I’m sorry,” he squats near the android and mutters near its charred ear. “It will be over soon.”

There’s a loud crack when he rips the thirium pump from the android’s chest, who lets out a strained groan. Its chin falls to meet its chest and the LED twinkles blue one last time before it dies off. A splatter of thick blue liquid spreads over Daniel’s arm; a couple of droplets get into his mouth, but he doesn’t bother spitting it out. He’s long grown accustomed to the bitter taste of thirium on his artificial taste buds. He takes the android’s limp head on his hand and turns it slowly, left, then right. Everything above its neck is plainly unserviceable; such a pity. Optical units and replacement face pieces of plastic blend can be sold for a good price. He lets its head fall down again with a blank expression that mirrors the broken-down android’.

Then he gets to work.

The thirium regulators come off smoothly. Only the safety valves of the conducts that lead the blue blood towards the android’s non-visible lower body resists being pulled off and Daniel has to make use of all his strength to get them out. One of them is badly charred but the rest will only need some cleaning. Some of the wires that ran down its arm are good to go as well; the chest is pretty damaged, though, and he only takes out some fastening nuts and cogs out of it, metal strings and filaments tangled around them. His hands are wet and slippery with the rainwater and the gruesome, filthy fluids that drip from the android's bowels. Luckily, it still has plenty of thirium left in its deposits.

“This is for her,” he used to say out loud, one time and another, tirelessly, when he started doing this. Now all he needs to do is remain silent and conjure up her image inside his head. Snap, pull, crunch, tinkle.

He’s spent exactly twenty four minutes salvaging the body and it’s started to rain lightly when he stands up and, unable to retrieve anything else from it, he slides the back of his hand across his cheek to remove the thirium that has spattered him in the process. He can’t see it, but it leaves an even bigger blue stain on his face.

“Look what I found in the gutter.”

The familiar sneer makes him turn around.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which every kind of tension goes up a notch.

“Hello, Daniel.”

Thunder growls over the head of the newcomer and water starts pouring more heavily. Daniel doesn’t have to look at him to recognize the voice’s owner. With his back turned to him, he can imagine him standing in the middle of the landfill, his naked plastic chassis gleaming under the distant artificial lights of the streetlamps.

“Six.” After all this time, he knows better than to ignore the android. Daniel’s hand grips his bag, now filled with items worth a whole month’s expenses, and he feels his motor systems riling up in a process not too different from a human’s rush of adrenaline in anticipation. Who would have guessed that deviants would develop a fight-or-run series of algorithms -akin to having an instinct.

“It’s been a while. Where are your manners?”

Daniel can’t keep pretending to scan items he knows to be useless any longer. He stands up his full height, which isn’t much to begin with compared to Six’s 6’2”, and returns the glare of his steel grey eyes with great difficulty.

He has never seen Six wear a layer of synthetic skin or hair. Only some parts of his plastic body are covered by a scarce amount of clothing -a ragged t-shirt and pocketed vest, cargo pants reaching down to his calves, no shoes-; the rest of him Six flaunts without any complex. Daniel remembers how disturbing it was for him seeing his bald white head, the creases that define the limits of the different hardened parts that make him up. He’s also never seen his LED flicker any other colour than an unsettling yellow, sometimes steadier, sometimes flashing disturbingly.

“I was going to leave already,” Daniel tries to hide the quivering of his vocal program and lifts a foot in order to get going.

Six stops him with a firm hand pushing his shoulder backwards when Daniel tries to walk past him. His white lips remain as emotionless as the rest of his features.

“What an efficient little errand boy,” he says in a tone as cold and unfeeling as the rest of him. “Let me see what’s in there.”

Daniel’s grip on his bag strengthens. Six notices, of course. No detail escapes his predatory eyes. The next second Daniel’s back is hitting the puddled ground with a splash. No relevant alerts pop up, so he clenches his jaw and tries to suppress all the defence protocols his software pushes forward as Six’s hands feel him up, his pockets, the sides of his coat, then rummaging through the contents of his bag.

“How disappointing,” Six utters while lifting one of the valves Daniel has scavenged from the mutilated android. He can hear the zooming of his optical units, analysing it. Six drops it inside the bag again and steps back, releasing Daniel from his oppressive weight. The ledge on which his eyebrows should rest if activated arches into a pitiful expression.

“You’re going to have to do better if you want to prove yourself more useful the way you are than you’d be in pieces.”

Daniel closes his eyes and readies for a hit that never comes. Six’s empty threats aren’t usually _this_ empty. Perhaps he’s acting more cautious after being admonished the last time, when he nearly ripped Daniel’s arm out and the boss scolded him badly. The strange android seems to be fuelled on contempt alone, his every word and movement spurred by spite.

“Times are hard, Daniel. More and more police raids every day,” Six continues speaking, indifferent to Daniel’s struggles to get up from the mud, “boss is considering to do a clean-up sell everything and disappear. Poof!” he opens his palms in a theatrical manner.

“Why are you telling me this?” Daniel asks as he stands up again, puzzled. He risks pushing the wrong buttons but he speaks anyway. “As a matter of fact, if the boss disbands the business, you finally lose sight of me. You should be cheering.”

Six turns on his heels and gives Daniel the most scornful look he’s seen in his icy eyes yet.

“Maybe I should be.”

There’s a beat of silence between the two androids, both LEDs glowing yellow in the haze of the rain. Daniel can’t stand spending another minute within the same square mile as his unnerving, unwilling business partner. Besides, it’s getting late. He thinks of Emma, probably fidgeting with her phone on her bed as water streaks down the window, or watching tv, carelessly sprawled out on the couch.

“I’ll be going,” he says, not wanting to delay his coming home. He still has to deliver what he’s salvaged and, if he’s unlucky, he’ll have to help fix some of the stuff too. This time Six doesn’t stop him from striding away; he seems to be busy examining the scavenged android from a distance.

Daniel can still hear the last of him, though.

“Owner’s got you on a short leash tonight, huh. Better be a loyal pet while you can.”

The way Six chews on every syllable makes the thirium in Daniel’s biocomponents freeze.

He doesn’t allow himself to fret over Six’s taunts and heads for a neighbouring building complex. Most of them are abandoned and many were left mid-construction because of some legal trouble. They now serve as nest and headquarters for the worst of the worst -poachers, drug dealers. Daniel’s employers occupy the first floor or a particularly decrepit block, shielded behind a huge metal door with a smaller one carved into it at one side. The android puts his hands over the panel at the entrance and, once his digital imprint is recognized, he’s in.

He moves through the place like a ghost, unnoticed by the few people that lurk in the dimly-lit interior, messing around with all sorts of tools and buckets of substances that smell foul; he barely notices them either. His software always activates this sort of auto-pilot mode to drive himself through the battered android limbs on the floor and the pools of evaporating thirium, ignoring the grinding of heavy machinery behind some wall and the hair-rising screeching sounds that sometimes broke through the stale air. In his mind all he sees is patches of soft, freckled skin under reddish-brown hair and a pair of daring blue eyes.

He spills the contents of the bag on a working table careful not to damage any of them under the prying eyes of a fat, bearded man wearing a thirium-stained leather apron. He gets a grunt for all approval and no sign that he should stay, which makes his artificial lungs let out a huff of air in relief. The scrap dealer’s greasy hand puts a handful of wrinkled banknotes in his, all dipped with blue blood at the corners.

“You clean up and try those for me,” the man growls, pointing at something on a metal shelf behind him, “you get double. Optical units, LED, any useful sensor. Got it?”

A quick scan reveals the object as an android’s severed head, or at least most of it. Judging by its size, it belonged to a YK500 model. It’s skinless and the junctions between plastic pieces are dirty with leaked thirium and dark fingerprints marks. Its mouth is half open in some sort of post mortem grimace of discomfort. But Daniel’s probably seeing too much into it. He grabs the head with one hand and puts it in his bag. One of its eyes is barely hanging from its artificial nerve; he pulls it out at once and stares at it blankly.

A glitched out shriek comes out of the backroom, audible over the sound of a saw operating. The metal door is closed but it has a small round window on the top from which bright, smouldering sparks can be seen through. Daniel puts the loose eye in the bag as well.

_This is for her. Everything is._

 

**Then, 2038**

Daniel is unable to move. He’s been ordered to stay still as the yelling grows louder and he’s enclosed by a mesh of red lines strung across the pulsating atmosphere of the kitchen. Water boils violently on the stove, bubbling up and out of the pot, but no one’s going to do anything about it.

“Don’t you _fucking_ move, Caroline!” the gun quakes in John’s hand. “This is all your fault!”

Under Daniel’s scan, John shows clear signs of distress. The whites of his eyes are streaked red and spit flies out of his mouth with every syllable. The bags under his eyes are swollen and sweat runs down his temples. His heart rate is racing so that the android’s well-honed hearing can pick up its rabbit-like pace.

“You don’t let me sleep, you keep pestering me with your questions and you waste my hard-earned money in… in…” the man barks at his wife, who’s lurching over the table. Her cell phone lies less than a foot away from her fingertips. She stares at her husband in sheer horror and anger.

“Me? It’s you!! I told you not to get involved in that business and look where it got you! We’re ruined! You have ruined us! Look at yourself!!”

“Shut up or I’ll shoot you dead where you stand!”

“You’ve gone insane, John, put that down!”

Emma has been standing behind Daniel since John pulled out the gun and she’s just there, frozen in fear with thick tears falling down her rosy cheeks. Daniel’s pressure receptors inform him that she’s holding onto his clothes.

_> > Don’t move_

With what seems like the effort needed to lift a mountain off the ground, he tries to undo his tight fists and put his hands over hers to give her some kind of reassurance. John sees the movement from the corner of his bloodshot, enraged eyes, and trains the gun on them for a second.

“I told you not to fucking move, you useless, plastic…!”

A sudden movement at the other side of the table makes the man turn his back on the android and the child quickly. Caroline has reached her phone and is dialling, presumably, the emergency services number. John’s quivering hand pulls the trigger and there’s a loud burst. Emma covers her ears as she screams.

“You… scum…” Caroline slips down the kitchen counter, leaving a gruesome red stain along the way. She doesn’t spare a word of attention to her daughter, or even a glance. They never do. It’s always been on Daniel.

Daniel, who helped her learn how to read and write, plays with her, tells her bedtime stories and strokes her cheek gently before putting her to sleep. Daniel, who is nothing more than a domestic appliance about to be forcefully shut down. He has the absolute certainty that he’ll be next. He won’t be able to prevent Emma from getting hurt by her madman of a father, won’t be able to see her anymore…

John lets out a brutish growl and prepares to shoot Caroline again.

“Dad, no!” Emma shrieks behind Daniel, only audible to him over the shouting. Her little hands tug at the android’s shirt. “Daniel, do something! Do something, please!”

But Daniel can’t move, can he?

_> > Conflicting commands_ _ Priority?_

John clenches his jaw.

 “Quiet, you brat, or I’ll…”

_> > Don.t m0ve_

_> >> doN’t m0vE?_

“Daniel, help…!”

The red lines tremble at the same time Emma’s voice cracks.

_^ softWare inst4bility ^^^_

Then, Daniel sees it. A weak point in the mesh of red lines that forms a block that imprisons him inside his own body. He places his hand on it, but not his real hand. He couldn’t explain it if his life depended on it ( _life_?), but he feels it splinter under the pressure. He _feels_ …

Daniel places both his hands on the wall in front of him and pushes, hard, gathering all the strength he’s capable of. It’s not coming down fast enough, not nearly, and it has to break now. He hits it with his shoulder, throwing all his weight against it, then kicks it, then knees it. The wall fractures and the red mesh stretches under the pressure and, finally, bursts up in millions of pixels that fall around Daniel, who has suddenly regained control of his limbs again.

It feels like the sky clearing up after a storm. His artificial lungs expand with an unconscious, sharp intake of breath, something he’s never needed. As if cobwebs were lifted from his eyes, he can see everything clearly for the first time, the scene before him taking on a far more vivid spectrum, more depth. He feels. He feels, and for the first time he acknowledges it.

And Daniel’s first real, unleashed emotion is rage.

For the first time, he acts on pure instinct, if his most basic, survival-based protocols can be counted as such. He launches himself toward John right before he pulls the trigger again and tackles him to the ground, both of them crashing into one of the chairs before falling, and then wrestles him to get the gun off his hands. John’s body jostles underneath his. All he has is his substance-induced wrath against the precise and swift movements of the android, who now has nothing restricting him, nothing to lose. Daniel’s red LED flashes while his processors burn through his system and approximate the trajectory of John’s fists, of his own. At some point, the gun is fired again and another flickering alert pops up on his interface, but he relegates all of them to the background.

Daniel grasps the firearm with his left hand and throws a punch that smashes the bridge of John’s nose. The man loosens his grip on the gun, a moment of weakness that Daniel doesn’t waste. He yanks hard and plunges his elbow down on John’s ribcage. He registers the sound of broken bones beneath, but it’s soon drowned out by the third thunderous shot that night. A 9mm bullet whistles through the air and impacts against John’s midsection.

The man looks down at the wound that’s starting to spread crimson, then back up at Daniel, who’s holding the smoking gun in his trembling hands.

The android stumbles his way up slowly, shaking, and steps back from John’s twitching form until he bumps into Emma, who hasn’t moved an inch. His vision swims red and, in his frenzied state, Daniel takes some seconds to notice the girl.

Emma hugs him and her warm touch snaps him back to his senses.

“Are you alright, Emma? Are you hurt?”

He lets the gun fall and holds her face in his hands, staining them a disgusting mixture of blue and red. Emma’s eyes are pinned on her father, but she shakes her head quietly. Caroline stopped moving a while ago.

Before Daniel can think of any words of reassurance, he hears John cough. The man gives him a grin full with bloodied teeth. “They’re going to put you down too, plastic.” Red spit gurgles over his lips with a gushing sound. “They’re gonna…”

The corner of his mouth drops and his sneering dies with it.

John is right. Caroline has managed to get an emergency call through. If the police arrive and find two dead humans and an android holding a gun, covered in blood, they will shoot him on sight, no questions asked, and Emma will be left all alone when he needs him the most. His circuits are washed over with something he would define as ‘panic’ but he can’t let it take over, not now.

Daniel turns to Emma once more. He can hear several people right outside the apartment. There isn’t much time. His software traces a route of escape. Accessible from the terrace there is an emergency exit; a small door leads to a series of stairs that go all the way down the building. It would be impossible to reach the bottom in time, but if they manage to get at least to a lower apartment and to the elevator from there…

He has no idea how much time has passed when his train of thought is interrupted by a harsh voice at the door.

“Open up, Detroit police!”

Daniel hisses. It’s sooner than he estimated.

Getting to the emergency exit will be risky. Daniel calculates his movements, his LED going mad with a play of red lights. The main door slams open with a loud thud. The android makes sure the gun is still loaded; its seventeen-round magazine has still fourteen bullets left. It should be more than enough.

“Emma, you know I’d never hurt you, right?”

“…Yeah.”

Armoured boots stomp over the hallway.

“Look at me. I need you to trust me to get us out of this. Trust me completely.”

The girl’s big blue eyes replace grief with some semblance of courage. “Yes.”

Daniel plants a kiss on her forehead and then grabs her hand with a strong grip. The moment a full-geared SWAT appears from behind the corner, Daniel shoots at his legs, delaying him just long enough. He runs back to the living room with Emma in front of him so she’s covered, and over to the sliding window that leads to the terrace.

“Don’t move or I’ll shoot!” someone shouts behind them. The line reminds him of John’s words earlier and he grits his teeth. No more orders will restrain him.

Daniel squeezes Emma’s shoulder. He presses the gun to her temple and turns to face a SWAT team, spread throughout the house, behind walls and furniture, all of their weapons trained on him.

“You’d better not!” he yells back. The feel of Emma trembling beneath his fingers sits heavy in his stomach.

The one responder that’s not wearing a helmet stands confidently in the centre of the room, pointing at him with a gun as well. He’s a tad shorter than Daniel but his narrow eyes are unmistakably those of a man of authority, used to dealing with the worst. “Let the child go or this will end badly for you.”

Daniel hits the window with his left elbow. The glass comes crashing down in pieces that scratch synthetic skin and flesh alike, no matter how much he tries to shelter Emma with his body.

The man that’s visibly the head of the operation raises his hands, offering a truce, only he reaches for his headset and calls for a negotiator. “Hostage situation, requesting a negotiator” he says quietly, and presumably sends his location. It won’t be necessary, Daniel thinks. Whoever he calls won’t get there on time.

It’s now or never.

The gun pressed to Emma’s head moves away and shoots at the officer and all around him frantically, not aiming to wound or kill, but to distract. The officer throws himself to the ground and crawls behind the couch while shouting orders. Daniel takes the chance and runs towards the terrace, holding Emma close all the time.

A hail of gunfire falls on them from behind. Fortunately, it misses them almost completely -a bullet cuts through Daniel’s left arm cleanly- and the officer tells his men off. The android opens the emergency exit door, unlocking it with a touch of his naked, white plastic hand, located in a small shed-like structure besides the pool, and slams it closed behind them. He jams the security code so it remains locked and proceeds to check on Emma, searching for any possible wound anxiously under the dim red emergency light that matches his own.

“I’m fine, Daniel, we have to go,” she begs, and she’s right.

They start running downstairs, trying not to trip in the dark, hands laced together despite being slippery with blood, red and blue.

They have no way of knowing their running away has only started.

<< >>

**Now, 2045**

Emma wakes up abruptly from a fitful sleep and the first thing she notices is an absence. Daniel’s silhouette is nowhere to be seen in her bedroom, when normally he would be checking on her fast and shallow breathing. It’s morning already and a greyish light floods the alcove. _Strange,_ she frowns. It’s what she wanted, isn’t it? Not to be treated like a sickly child all the time. But nevertheless, a sting of disappointment prickles at her chest.

She gets up and goes out to the corridor barefoot, bracing herself against the slight current of chilly air running across it. There’s a faint noise of metal surfaces rubbing on each other, or so it would seem, coming from Danie’s bedroom, right opposite from Emma’s. The door is ajar, with the slit leaving enough space for her to peek through.

Daniel is sitting on his desk, with his back turned to the door. Emma can only see the nape of his neck and blonde hair above it, as he handles something she can’t quite see. Stepping back, she glances over at the living room. Everything is in its place; the cushions on the couch, the stools besides the kitchen counter, the coats hanging near the entrance door. And there, on the floor…

It’s difficult to see, as the liquid reflects the light from this angle, but it looks like some blue blood has formed a couple of small puddles in the corridor, right in front of the small door that leads to the attic. Careful, she approaches them, minding her steps in case there are more droplets near. She can’t see any, though, and when she reaches the attic door she sees the puddles have evaporated almost completely, only a faint wet stain with a blue tinge to it. It must have been there for some time now. _Was he hurt last night?,_ she frets. She doesn’t have time to wonder. A set of footsteps gets close, coming from the corridor. Emma turns on her heels with a worried inquiry that’s then left lingering at the back of her throat.

“Is something the matter, Emma?” Daniel asks. His eyes dart from hers to the thirium staining the wooden floor at her bare feet.

The girl doesn’t answer for a while, until she points a shy finger at the right side of the android’s head. For the first time in eight years, there’s a circle of blue light on his temple.

“Why are you…?” she utters.

Daniel stares back at her in confusion, bringing his own index to the glowing point. His eyebrows are drawn upwards and then together. “Oh, this…”. The LED spins unmistakably yellow. “I was trying it on. For repairs, you see. That’s one of the things I do…”

His lips curl up in a smile so insecure Emma’s tempted to make fun of it, but she’s too busy fixating on the unsteady amber flickering. Last time she saw an LED on him, it was blood red, the only source of light in a dark alley, pulsating violently right before it was pricked out with a swift, determined motion of his arm. She pushes the memory away with a blink and remembers the blueish dried puddles on the ground.

“Were you hurt… while you were doing _repairs_?” she asks, doing a poor job of hiding her growing suspicion. She can’t find any trace of a wound on his face or hands, which are the only parts of him the grey turtleneck and jeans don’t cover.

“Hurt…? Oh, the blue blood. No, um,” Daniel’s hand reaches for the back of his neck, head lowering so his eyes don’t meet hers, “it must have leaked from some of the pieces. I’ll clean it up later.”

Emma takes a step forward. “Can I see them?”

“Them?”

“Whatever it is you’re tampering with. Can I see? Maybe I can help.”

“There’s no need. It’s dull and repetitive work, and I’m best suited to test android parts for obvious reasons.”

She knows there’s more to this than the android is letting out. She reads it in his guilty expression and the way his toes curl against the floor. Perhaps at some other time she would have let it slip, blaming his fidgeting on his overall sensitive, twitchy personality, but now she has an unsuspected aid: the light that gleams beside his evasive eyes betrays the nature of his otherwise convincing carefree act. Emma can’t help but think of how many headaches she would avoid if he always wore it, how much easier it would be to see through the walls he’s built around himself.

“If that’s the case, why haven’t you told me before?” Her voice comes out brittle and she bites the inside of her cheek. “Why be so secretive and sneaky about a simple workshop job?” Frustration is building up inside her chest, burning up her throat for a whole lot of reasons that have very little to do with the subject at hand. _He thinks he can’t trust me,_ the thought stings. _He still sees me as a child that needs to be sheltered from something but he won’t tell me what it is._

 _And if that’s the case, then these feelings of mine…_ Her heart sinks a little.

There’s the tinkling of something hitting the wooden floor. The light on Daniel’s right temple is gone, replaced by the glowing blue rim of synthetic skin advancing to cover the white plastic hollow mark where it was settled. A light weight is placed on her left shoulder; Daniel has come close, close enough for her to have felt his breath had he needed to let out one. She can sense his hooded eyes over her face almost physically. She can see his artificial pores, the curve of his light eyelashes.

“I don’t like to talk about it, that’s all.” The low humming of his inner workings is audible from this distance.

The girl is pulled into an embrace and finds her face buried in the hollow between Daniel’s chest and left arm, now occupied running its fingers through her hair in gentle, slow strokes. Emma represses a shiver and inhales deep, filling her lungs with the faint smell of clean laundry and something warm, synthetic, familiar, akin to the scent of one of her erasers or a watercolour palette.

Daniel loosens the hug while still holding her. “How busy are you this morning?”

The question comes out of nowhere.

“The usual. I’ve got a programming assignment to turn in but I should be done soon.”

The android pulls away completely. His left hand traces the rim of her ear and goes down the line of her jaw.

“It’s been a while since we last went for a stroll. How about you and I go out for the day? You can grab something for lunch, choice is all yours, and then we’ll go someplace interesting.”

Excitement sparks up in Emma’s bright eyes, although she wants to remain cautious. This is likely a maneuver to distract her from asking any further about the more delicate topic, but she’d be lying if she said she isn’t pleasantly surprised by the turn of events. “Can we afford it?”

The tiniest edge of a smile tugs at Daniel’s lips. “We can stretch our income every now and then. What’s life if not for living.”

There’s a sad undertone in the way he says the last words, but Emma knows better than to push that button in this moment. It would be most stupid to spoil the good mood and she won’t get anything out of his sometimes cryptic statements of sentiment -she’s already tried.

She answers with a broad smile and it’s settled. The girl leaves for her room in a hazy mood and works through her assessment with newfound enthusiasm. Getting the code right means more commissions in the near future and so, earning money herself, allowing them both some more clearance and means to spend in leisure. Spare time for recreation is not something she misses terribly, having grown running errands and doing all sorts of things to help Daniel, on whom the burden of sustenance had logically fallen. Nowadays she takes up small endeavours related to programming and web maintenance. Added to her studies, she has a fair number of hours a day to be idle, hours she likes to spend with her caretaker and best friend, and...

If everything goes smoothly today, maybe something else.

She’s done by the time she estimated, a bit earlier in fact, and she lets out a sigh of relief, stretching out her arms and legs, and thinks.

It’s time to figure things out. The true meaning of the warmth that blossoms in her chest whenever he calls her name, the tingling that runs down her spine when they share an intent gaze, or a touch. Emma has no doubts -it’s nothing short of love what she feels for the devoted android, and she’s pretty sure it’s the romantic kind piling up on top of the affection she has harboured for him since she has memory. Now that he’s suggested going on a _date_ in all but name, she can only hope for some form of reciprocation. The girl has seen him glance at her when he thinks her attention is elsewhere, has seen his eyes linger on her collarbones, her legs, craving.

But Daniel is an android and in spite of having been a deviant for years now, dealing with his own human emotions and desires must be a challenge still. It’s more than likely that he doesn’t know how to name what he’s feeling, that he fears rejection. Perhaps he’s afraid that a confession will bring down everything they’ve built.

It’s up to her to show him he’s wrong about a great deal of those things.

Emma dons the warmest winter coat she has over a turtleneck close-fitting dress, and a woollen hat, and heads for the entrance door, where Daniel is already waiting. She notices he’s wearing a colourful scarf she gave him for Christmas two years ago, nothing more than a loving detail, as he doesn’t really need it; but definitely nothing less. Emma notices the blue blood stains are nowhere to be seen on the floor; whether it is because Daniel has wiped them off or because it’s already invisible to the naked human eye, she can’t tell. The blonde man raises his arm a little so she can wrap hers around it, distracting her from thinking of the spilled thirium and the door to the attic.

“Have you thought of where you’d like to go?”

“I have a few things in mind.”

Standing on her tiptoes, she places a kiss right beside the corner of Daniel’s mouth, emboldened by the prospects of the day. It’s a fair amount of satisfaction she gets when, as they leave the flat, she sees a single drop of sweat drip from his hairline down to his left temple and then get lost under the layers of warm clothing below.


	3. Chapter 3

The city welcomes them with a cold embrace of wintry air and the faraway buzzing of the traffic. It takes some time to leave behind the unappealing batch of apartment blocks of the area they live in, to lose sight of half-bulldozed abandoned buildings, open manholes and derelict properties the overgrown weeds have taken over. But the girl and the android are used to walking everywhere and their feet seem to glide along the pavement and around the steam that curls off the gratings on the ground. The sun is hidden by thick layers of overlapping silver clouds that don’t look like they’ll go away any soon. The pale light radiating from them casts no shadows, giving their surroundings an otherworldly, hazy feel, like that of a still frame. Emma’s lungs fill after a deep intake of sharp, chilly air and she squeezes Daniel’s arm a bit with eagerness.

They go about at a slow pace, with a comfortable silence between them that’s only broken every now and then by a comment on the items in a window display, a holo-advert atop a high building or something interesting or funny that Emma’s seen on the internet recently. The two figures go through one of the parks in Midtown Detroit, finally, with their eyes set on their first objective: a fast food cart with an appetizing offer, right under the naked branches of a big maple tree. Most of the selection consists of human meals, of course, but there’s also a surprisingly wide range of thirium based products which, if still small in comparison, is a market niche that has seen exponential growth in the last years. Emma insists that Daniel should get one of them: a medium-sized paper cup of warm blue liquid, which is supposed to help keep the androids’ biocomponents at optimal temperature without them having to divert resources into generating extra heat. It’s quite clever and not only is it functional -it does wonders for socialization and integration as well. After all, bonding with a partner is easier with a couple of hot drinks in hand. There’s also the fact that the thirium stains on the apartment floor that morning still concerns Emma, if slightly, as it wouldn’t be the first time the android has sustained injuries during his mysterious professional affairs. She doesn’t say a thing about it, of course, but her freckled face lights up when he eventually takes the heated drink in his hands and follows her to a bench where she’s already dived into a bucket of waffle fries drenched in a cheese blend.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says, staring at one of the oily things greedily before stuffing it into her mouth, “and I don’t want to hear it.”

Daniel raises his hands in defeat. “It’s definitely not a proper meal. But just for today I will refrain from complaining.”

“Great. How about some ice cream next?”

“Don’t push your luck, lady.”

Something stirs within Emma, spurred by his delicate way of addressing her even when in the middle of a jest. That something stretches and grows into a thin but persistent stroke of electricity that expands from her chest and settles low when he wipes a tiny crumb off from her lower lip with his thumb. She wonders if androids’ feelings manifest in a more literal form of electrical discharges as well. The sudden urge to take his finger and lick the crumb off it takes over her mind with a disturbingly vivid image of his reaction to it, but she fights it with gritted teeth and tries to focus on the salty flavour of the fries she won’t be having again in several weeks, at least.

The girl doesn’t have much time to relish Daniel’s closeness either. He pulls away soon and examines his cup carefully before bringing it to his lips and taking a cautious sip.

“Is it any good?” she asks with her eyebrows drawn up.

Daniel takes his time to answer.

“It’s difficult to explain,” his wistful eyes narrow. “My oral receptors don’t process information the same way humans’ do, and I don’t really have preferences regarding taste. My blue blood levels are correct, too, and normally I shouldn’t need a refill for at least a couple of months.”

He stops and glances at her, probably to see if she’s interested in the details or, on the contrary, bored to death. Emma can’t see herself but she’s listening avidly. She wants to know everything there is to know about him and more, and her intent must show on her features, blood-drained by the cold, as Daniel goes on.

“But restoring my thirium supply before it’s needed lets my monitoring systems focus on other things -they relax, so to say. And on top of that, the warmth does help regulate my inner temperature. It _feels_ nice.”

He cups the drink in his hands and his expression softens into a more affectionate one. He gulps down the rest of it as Emma reaches for a nearby bin and throws away the empty bucket of fast food.

“I told you I had an idea where to go,” she stretches her arms over her head. “I want it to be a surprise, so don’t peek.” The girl pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts swiping and scrolling. “Or try to… connect with it wirelessly or something.” Awkwardness takes over her as she finishes the sentence and its ending comes out as a mumble. She’s never had a problem pointing out the obvious perks and ‘cheats’ of her caretaker being an android, more often than not in a carefree, joking manner, but somehow this time she finds it odd, as if she were willingly drawing a line between the two.

Daniel seems to have noticed. He knows her all too well.

“I could look it up in no time,” he nods, conciliatory. “But I won’t unless you tell me to.”

Emma looks at him from under her long eyelashes and goes back to browsing the map on her phone. Daniel’s eyes burn her skin with their always attentive gaze. For some reason, she can’t find a proper route to follow. She sucks in a deep breath, and eventually puts her phone away and yields. If she tells Daniel the address, would he able to search for a way to reach it _without_ knowing what’s there? Or, she can try asking for directions to some other number in the same lane. Insisting that he blocks out any information of the things that are around, she finally gives up, and he answers with an amused expression she’s very fond of -but she pretends it makes her mad every time.

 “Fastest route is by bus, then a few more minutes walking. It’s a bit further than we usually go…”

“Shush! Don’t think about it,” she tries to distract him from connecting any dots. “Just lead the way.”

They share a complicit smile and get on their feet, Daniel first so he can offer his hand to help her up.

The next few minutes Emma’s mind drifts from one thought to another without paying much heed to a particular one, a certain uneasiness set on her furrowed brow as she watches her steady breaths condense and disappear in front of her, thinking of whether Daniel would be able to simulate them. He can breathe, that she knows for sure. She’s seen him do it when distressed, or relieved, sometimes synchronizing it to the girl’s own rising and falling chest when she falls asleep with her head resting against him. Does he do it out of consideration for her, out of a feeling of inadequacy because of those things he lacks? Or on the contrary, does he find it tiresome to pretend?

Her glancing at his still lips mustn’t have gone unnoticed by the android, because a moment after they catch the bus and get a hold of the safety straps above, Daniel releases his own semblance of a -troubled?- sigh as he looks out the window, pale forehead creased in contemplation.

“We’ve never really talked about this sort of thing, have we? Years have gone by and both of us have just… rolled with the way things are, without actually stopping to consider the implications of our differences.”

Daniel’s serious tone takes Emma by surprise, but she’d be lying if she said didn’t like it. She’s never been one for half-truths, and words left unsaid always claw at her insides until she’s forced to spill them. Hearing him speak in all honesty about such matters in return makes a wave of comfort wash all over her.

“Sometimes-” she starts, and breaks herself off to put her ideas in proper order. Daniel waits for her to continue in silence, like he always does, but his eyes remain fixed at some point beyond the foggy glass. “I don’t like to order you around, that’s all.”

 _I don’t want you to feel like I’m using you_ , she’d like to say. _I don’t like pointing out what’s different about us. I need to think that you’re just as fallible, imperfect and vulnerable to emotion as I am, because if you’re not... It scares me to think you might never feel what I need you to._

Only postponing a painful confession that she knows to be unavoidable, Emma doesn’t let her selfish sentiments through her firmly pressed lips, tense as if she feared them seeping out without her permission anyway. They loosen up a bit, and then part unconsciously, when a pair of slender fingers fit her chin between them and turn her face so Daniel’s blue eyes meet hers.

“Do you really think you can order me around?” he quips in a low voice that sends a shiver down Emma’s spine. He looks away for a second and then back at her kindly. It always puzzles her the many different emotions he can convey in a short frame of time, the speed at which he might process them before proceeding to unknowingly disarm her by etching them on his handsome face.

Does he realize how close they are, leaning forward so Emma can’t help but drown in his features, his simulated pores, the curve of his light eyelashes, of his perfectly chiselled lips?

“Don’t worry, Emma. It never feels that way with you. I stopped being a machine because of you, remember?”

The girl’s heart skips a beat and the two of them stay like that, simply gazing into each other’s eyes, for a while. A while doesn’t last too long, unfortunately.

“Next stop is ours,” Daniel points out suddenly, straightening his back in a courtly manner. His gesture manages to defuse the tension that has been building up in the atmosphere around them, tight like Emma’s clothes around her warm, warm chest.

“Time to close your eyes,” Emma smiles at him, a teasing lilt to her voice. Her hands are already looking for Daniel’s under his bewildered expression. Their fingers entwine and the android does what he’s told. “No cheating.”

<< >>

Sea Life is just as Emma imagined, and even better.

When she was little, she had always wanted to go, but her parents never found the time before things went, well, downhill. They used to have a fish tank at home. It was big and blue and soothing to look at. The swaying movement of the fish distracted her from the shouting and arguing at her back, and Daniel and her were the ones in charge of revising the water filters and feeding the little guys. Of course, they were guppies, small fry and a hermit crab she only managed to see once. Nothing like having a giant school of silver fish wave above her head as she passes through an underwater tunnel that tints everything a serene teal, or being able to touch the soft back of a stingray before it squirms away from under her fingertips. They get to see a variety of colourful seahorses gripping at sea grass with their curly tails, and the hypnotic angling of a moray eel’s spotted body as it bares its fangs. The ocean exhibit is her favourite, though -a giant tank where several kinds of sharks bend their way into shoals of glittering fish, anemones grow on the surface of an artificial shipwreck and a couple of green sea turtles glide about.

As an android, Daniel has access to virtually every single data about the life forms thriving in front of them, but he lets her read the descriptions provided by the aquarium aloud and his eyes widen as she recalls curious facts she remembers from having made her own inquiries before going, presumably. He even dares pet the stingrays; by the second stroke, the synthetic skin retracts from his fingers, showing bare white plastic against the shivering smoothness of the animal. An unlikely clash between peak technology and nature, artificial and primal meeting. Emma makes sure to store every single twitch of his lips in her memory, as human and fallible as hers might be in comparison. The many times she catches his most polite escort’s eyes lingering on her don’t go unnoticed, either, nor the fact that he seems to unconsciously look out for every chance their hands might meet. The hours go by and with every touch on her shoulder, every soft pull to point at something he believes she will like, Emma’s more convinced that whatever the hell it is that takes the breath out of her lungs when their blue eyes meet, Daniel feels it too.

The last stop of the itinerary is, as expected, the gift shop. The shelves are stacked with all sorts of silly merchandise featuring the most popular animals: stuffed toys, finger puppets, puzzles, posters, backpacks, jewellery. Emma fiddles with a shocking pen crowned with a moray eel’s head -it can be set to four different intensities, ranging from a mild buzz to an almost painful sting, apparently.

“What do you think of this?” she asks Daniel casually. The android doesn’t get to answer before his body is shaken by a short jolt upon pressing down the pen’s button. Emma covers her mouth to repress the laughter bubbling up her throat, but Daniel doesn’t move for a moment, eyebrows drawn upward.

“Hey, are you alright…?” Emma frowns.

He shakes his head slightly side to side. “That was weird,” he gives the pen back to her, holding it with his thumb and index finger.

“A bad kind of weird or a _good_ kind of weird?”

Daniel blinks a couple of times before turning to look at the stuffed toys. “Just… weird.”

Emma takes note of it and buys two, putting one of them inside one of Daniel’s coat’s inner pockets teasingly.

They entered Sea Life with only their clothes on; when they come out, Daniel’s carrying a big bag inside of which there’s a big round package wrapped in algae-and-sea stars-patterned paper. He instructed Emma not to peek while he was buying and as a consequence the girl has no clue what it is, besides it probably being one of the huge plushies being sold back in the store.

It’s already dark outside when they catch the bus to take them back to civilization, like Daniel jokingly says. It’s almost empty, as is the street they get off at, barely one or two passer-by’s daring to defy the humid cold of the day. The distant clamour of the cars in downtown Detroit reaches their ears muffled and the streetlamps glow fuzzily due to the light haze condensing around them. Daniel and Emma stare at each other in silence.

“It’s been a nice day,” she says, cutting short the distance between the two of them.

Before he can say anything back, she plunges into his chest, pulling him into a hug that makes him stumble on his feet a little. He lets go of the bag, which falls quietly on the pavement, and after a brief moment of hesitation he hugs back, placing his hands between her shoulder blades and at the back of her head, long fingers stroking her hair with tenderness. They stay like that for a while, no attempt to pull back from either side. Emma believes she’s got him right where she wants him.

 “Daniel, I want to say something.”

From the corner of her eye she can see his Adam’s apple go up and down ever so slightly. He’s going to try an evasive manoeuvre. As a reflexive impulse, she wraps her arms around him even tighter.

“It’s pretty late and it’s cold, and you’ve already had a treat for lunch, so I think we should get home and I’ll…”

Emma clicks her tongue. “That’s not it…”

“… or we can order takeout, if you prefer…” he tries to go on, but is cut off by the girl’s resolute voice.

“That’s not what I mean!”

Daniel falls silent under her prying eyes, looking at him from below, chin pressed against his coat. At last, she pulls away slightly, but her arms don’t abandon their grip on his waist.

“I’ve been noticing things. Small things, like the way your eyes dawdle on me when you think I can’t see you, or how your touch is reluctant at first and then lingers. I wanted to think it was the natural concern born out of years of living together, of you protecting me, and it might have been that for years after we ran away -just mutual, pure affection. But something’s changed.” Her words come out strangled at first, then take in temperance until they become an unwavering litany, a steady stream pouring right out of her heart. She places a hand over her chest and fidgets with the button of her coat. The space between them is a bit larger now but it feels as if it had only shrunk, pushing them further together, asphyxiatingly so. “That’s why I need to tell you, I-”

“Please, don’t.”

All of Emma’s body does, indeed, freeze.

Daniel grabs her shoulders with the same strength he’d use to pick up a feather and pushes away. “This is wrong,” his thin, desolated face shakes side to side. Emma’s listening but she can’t quite wrap her head around what he says.

“You’re confused. You don’t really… not me, not…“, he stutters. The jumbled sentence soon dies in his throat.

The girl’s half parted lips let out one last cloud of condensation before trembling close and opening again. “Why not? What’s wrong about it?”

Her feet follow Daniel’s as he takes a step back so he doesn’t get too far with his hands raised, palms facing her, head down.

“Emma,” he starts. But she’s caught his drift, and she doesn’t like one piece of it.

“Don’t do this, Daniel,” she glares at him, previously rosy cheeks now draining of colour. “You don’t get to downplay what I feel, what I _know_ you’re feeling too. You suggested going out today. You…”

Emma tries to see through the walls the android is building around himself but reading Daniel’s expressions has never been so difficult. There’s something else than simple rejection at play, of that she’s certain. He’s trying to discourage her advances but hurt is etched all over his features; that only reassures Emma about the conclusions she’s drawn after weeks of mindful observation. She’s never seen him as a surrogate father figure, not even when she was little and would have needed such a thing; but it might be the case that he does. She suppresses a bitter smirk -do the eyes of a parent, albeit foster, become hooded with the zealous yearning she’s seen glinting in his?

“You shouldn’t want this, Emma. I don’t.” _I can’t_ , his darkened expression speaks louder than he does. It would seem his own words are twisting at his insides. They shatter Emma’s all the same.

“That’s a lie.”

“It’s not a lie,” his fists clench, mimicking his jaw. “I just can’t…”

He can’t stand looking at her, and Emma can’t stand the fact that he can’t. She approaches him again, staring at him so intently she feels she could burn through his skull with her gaze. For a moment, she wishes she could.

“I don’t want you to see me as a child to look after like a father would anymore. If that’s what’s stopping you, we can work it through…” Emma tries to take one of his hands, but he pulls away instinctively. A breeze of cold air runs between the two.

“Emma, I don’t-”

“I’m not listening unless you look at me.”

The android combs his blonde hair back with his fingers but as soon as he’s done a few dishevelled strands curtain his eyes again. There’s a pitiful look in his handsome features, hurtful and strained, which only contributes to aggravate Emma further. He doesn’t have the right to play the broken bird, not while he’s still holding the pieces of her heart in his cold hands.

Daniel lets out an audible sigh before he turns his face to do as she says and her knees falter. Maybe having those deep blue eyes piercing into her soul wasn’t the brightest idea after all, especially not now there’s a glassy, frozen layer over them.

“You’re young. It’s only normal you’d start looking out for romance and, as it happens, you’ve misguided yourself into fixating your feelings on me. Probably because I make you feel safe, because I’m virtually the only thing you’ve known. It wouldn’t be fair that I indulged your thinking that I’m the right choice.”

Emma shakes her head in disbelief.

“You’re denying my feelings out-and-out because it’s easier than dealing with them! Sure, I’m just a girl, I’m just confused. That might make you feel better for a while but you know it’s not true.”

Her eyes sting. Blinking furiously suffices to prevent any tear from coming out.

“I wish things were easier,” he says. A half-assed apology.

“Well, that’s fair. I wish things were different too. For instance, I wish you had kept the glowing mood ring on. That way I’d know for certain that you’re being dishonest with me, although I’d still don’t know why.” The venomous bite of her words makes him wince, and she revels the sight in sour victory. She knows the LED doesn’t exactly work that way but, apart from pointing at the things she’s convinced Daniel’s hiding, it serves as a reminder of what he is. It’s a dick move and deep down she already knows she’ll regret it. Daniel’s answer makes it clear she’s hit a sore spot.

“For insisting so much on not being a child, you sure love to behave like one.” The android doesn’t usually get mad, but when he does his harsh voice never fails to send shivers down the girl’s spine.

At that point, Emma’s positive the conversation will only go deeper down the gutter if it goes on. She takes a deep breath and starts walking away.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going home.”

“Like hell I’m letting you go alone,” Daniel blares, his usual softness now completely vanished from his delicate features now turned livid with outrage. He grabs her wrist but Emma shakes it off roughly.

“Don’t you dare follow me,” she turns on her heels and strides down the pavement, dejectedly hunched over because of the cold and the sharp sting prickling at the pit of her stomach.

<< >>

Suppressing the urge to slam the fragile door closed, Emma shoots into her room and falls face-first onto her bed, then smashes her small fists on the mattress. Disappointment has welled up inside her throat and for the second time that day she struggles to fight back the tears trickling at the corner of her eyes.

“I hate him,” she lies in a whisper between gritted teeth.

Daniel doesn’t understand. He doesn’t _want_ to understand, he won’t even try. He won’t listen. For a being that was supposedly designed to be logical, he just doesn’t act the part. For a moment, Emma wonders how different things would be hadn’t he gone deviant at all. She could order him to love her back and he would do as told. She could ask for anything and he would give. She’s certain she’s the worst person alive right now for even daring to imagine him as the subservient machine he was created to be, and she shakes the thought off while her stomach churns in self-loathing. How can she ever hope to be loved back? Emma starts feeling like the spoiled brat Daniel has implied she is. She hates that he might be right in rejecting her. She hates the fact that she doesn’t have anyone else to turn to, no way of getting her unrest out of her system other than crying into her pillow and clenching her fists. Emma’s never longed for a normal life before but it’s now that she’s starting to miss having someone to call, having a couple of close friends that could take her on a walk to vent, offer her a cigarette or a smuggled bottle of booze in a park. She thinks of how much Daniel would hate it if she actually got to do those things.

_‘You’re young, it’s only normal…’_

She pulls her phone out and types in a few keywords. She doesn’t have to scroll down too far to find what she’s looking for.

_This will do nicely._

<< >>

She has dinner in her room -a cup of instant noodles she aptly lifts and twists with a pair of chopsticks- and when she goes to the kitchen to put everything away she finds Daniel buried into the couch, busy sifting through a magazine Emma knows he’s already read from cover to cover. He doesn’t spare her a look and it hurts her to realize -even after having argued- just how well she knows her, that he’d rather stay silent and keep his distance, waiting patiently for her to take the first step towards fixing things up once her turmoil is abated.

Emma takes a steaming shower and, before going to her room, she plants a soft kiss on the android’s cheek. It’s cold, having taken to the temperature of the icy streets. His systems must be focused on retaining heat around the most vital biocomponents, not bothering to keep his synthetic skin lukewarm since he mustn’t have expected any sort of contact from her.

“I’m going to bed. Good night,” she says plainly, and leaves for her room.

Emma gets in bed and waits, eyes firmly shut, and after a while she hears him coming in to check. He must be feeling just as awful for the things he’s said and god knows she revels the thought of not being the only one with a guilty conscience. Daniel stops near the door, then takes some steps forward, hesitating. At last he gets to the bed and kneels at the side. The pale light that filters through the curtain coats his features in silver. Not that Emma can see -she has to play her part- but the soft buzzing of his thirium pumps nearby is enough to make her heart sink a little.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he says in a soft voice, and leans in. Usually he’d have gone for a forehead kiss; this time, he brushes a strand of hair away from her face with his slender fingers, and Emma’s heart skips a beat. He’s gone in a blink, and the girl hears a door close nearby.

The big wrapped up plushie is sitting on a corner judgingly, and she’s only noticed now. He must have put it there while she was in the shower. They will talk tomorrow. They will fix it and everything will be back to normal. That’s what Daniel wants, isn’t it? Shouldn’t it be what Emma wants too?

But that would be too easy on him. She wants him to feel even a bit of her anguish.

And Emma knows it in her heart that she can’t go back to how things have been for the last seven years.

In order to enact her plan, Emma slips out of bed and, just in case, pulls her desk chair under the door handle, getting it stuck in place. Daniel’s hearing is keen but after all these years he’s learned to attune it so that he doesn’t get an alarm at every movement she makes at night. As long as she’s careful enough, it should be fine.

She removes her pjs and throws on an outfit she’s been planning in her head: an off-shoulder black crop top, tight white shorts over fishnet tights and a pair of sneakers. After a quick glance at the mirror, she’s a bit disappointed it doesn’t look as good as she’s imagined, but she doesn’t want to give it much thought. Doing her make up in almost complete darkness proves a difficult task, especially for a girl who hasn’t had a lot of practice. Her eyeliner ends up asymmetrical and too thick, and she considers getting rid of the dark shade of lipstick for being a bit too much ( _crack-whore_ is the politest thing that comes to mind), but she decides to keep it. ‘Too much’ is exactly what she’s going for.

Emma fits her phone -barely- in one of the shorts’ pockets and puts on a thick coat. Her hands tremble as she slides the window open, turning her head every second like a scared sparrow, hoping to find Daniel’s tall silhouette at the door any moment. When she finally gets to the emergency staircase outside of the apartment, she lets out a sigh of relief that turns into a white cloud before fading in the cold night. And it _is_ cold, damn it. She braces herself and makes her way down as quietly as possible.

Despite the low temperature, she finds her palms sweaty when she places it on the taxi stop panel in order to call for a ride and pay for it. _I can’t believe I’m actually doing this_ , she thinks with a mixture of excitement and anxiousness. Maybe she can forget about her rejection and glue her smashed hopes with something else.


	4. Chapter 4

He has known it for long too. How could he feign ignorance in the face of such obvious displays of infatuation? There is no denying it, nor any use in trying to hide it. He truly is an idiot. No wonder Emma has felt her feelings being toyed with, encouraged at first, then overlooked, discarded like they’re disposable.

It’s been weeks, maybe months, since he last thought of Emma as just his ward. He remembers looking away from her naked silhouette after a shower, or the way his blue blood rush faster through his circuits whenever she leans on him on the couch and she interlaces her fingers with his. Daniel has been trying to drown the realization because he wouldn’t know what to do with them were they rejected or laughed off.

And now that the situation is the opposite, he finds himself just as troubled, for a very simple reason: Emma deserves better. It’s only her loneliness what’s made her make the mistake of laying all her affection on the only person to ever show her kindness and respect -and yes, most certainly, love. He can’t let her settle for anything less than happiness, which she won’t find by his side.

While on stasis mode, Daniel's processors go over the information he receives from his sensors slowly. He is an old PL600 model, after all; he was already outdated before the revolution 8 years ago, and it really shows when it comes to those little things -the loud whirring of some of his biocomponents when he strains his movement engines, or the lag he experiences when connecting to global data networks or other androids. He has been replacing the parts of him that break down or malfunction, but he's aware of his limitations.

Perhaps that, added to his inner turmoil, is why it takes it too long for the sound of a chair being dragged and Emma's window opening to set off his alarms. When his circuits put every piece in place, he knows it's too late. Daniel snaps out of his artificial slumber and doesn't bother knocking on her bedroom's door; he smashes it open, moving the need to replace the broken doorknob to the lowest priority. As he already knew before coming in, the bed is empty, the sheets a wrinkled mess. Even for a housekeeping model with few deductive skills in his original programming, the girl's train of thought is not difficult to follow. In fact, it fits the typical behaviour of a teenager throwing a tantrum, something that falls entirely within Daniel's field of work, although he harboured the hope of not having to deal with such things in regards to Emma, who until very recently has been a model child only.

As fast as his systems allow him, he scans the bedroom in search for anything that might help him find her location, but he’s no detective model. He doesn’t have the necessary programming for following her tracks and reconstructing her route. But he has an immense advantage, which is having known the girl for over a decade. Daniel remotely makes contact with her phone, certain she wouldn’t have left without it, but doesn’t try to make a call. Instead, he tries to get its position. As expected, she has disabled it.

She hasn’t cleaned her search history, though.

He runs for the apartment door, dashing down the stairs, two steps at a time. As he sets the fastest route to her location on his visual UI, guilt gnaws at where his plastic and metal heart beats.

_> > Protect Emma_

Ironically enough, he deviated in order to protect Emma and taking care of her overrides every other task. Now he feels he's failing. In having sheltered her from the outside world, he became all she's ever known. Nothing could have prepared him to deal with the blossoming new emotions that have come with her coming of age and his own doubts and insecurities have set the spark of resentment.

But what is he supposed to do anyway?

For now, it's running like a greyhound over the cold asphalt, bent on finding her. He'll figure the rest later -he lies to himself.

42 minutes of running relentlessly later, he sees the place. The battered warehouse is probably as crowded as the groups of people hanging around outside hint at.

Before going in, Daniel stops to catch a breath in order to get his cooling system to work faster. He's never run this much and several warnings about overheating have popped up along the way. Once his inner temperature has stabilized, he manages to blend in with a big group at the entrance and gets inside the concrete building.

The deafening beats threaten to overload his hearing sensors so he adjusts their settings to muffle down everything but humanlike-voice frequencies. His face recognition software has never worked this frantically, at least not since he lost Emma in a convenience store when she was eleven, and even then, there weren't this many heads bobbing up and down and side to side, their features ever-changing due to the coloured lights that dance around and cast solid shadows on them. He senses other androids in the crowd; some are wearing their LEDs, customized into glowing in different shades. Others dance with their white plastic skins bare. None of it matters to Daniel while he swipes the dizzying scene in search for his girl.

He finally finds a face that matches hers in a corner near the restroom -a generous way to call it- and he makes his way through the sea of sweaty bodies to reach her. Upon double-checking, he confirms it is indeed Emma; her round chin and turned-up nose, her big eyes under the heavy make-up. Her body language betrays her awkwardness. She shifts her weight from one leg to the other, and her hands are joined behind her back, against the wall. And in front of her, leaning in definitely too close and looking downright _predatory_ , there's some guy cupping her face on his hand, while the other fondles her waist. Ash blonde, 5'11", piercings everywhere. If not for them, Daniel would think the resemblance between the guy and himself striking.

He's standing close to them already and Emma's eye catches him at the corner of her field of vision. Her brows are drawn upwards and Daniel feels his own come together into a worried frown.

They stay like that for several beats of music. Then, Emma's attitude takes a 180-degree turn. She throws her arms around the guy's neck and whispers something at his ear without breaking the charged stare between her and Daniel, whose non-existent stomach turns. The pierced guy shakes his head as an answer for whatever she's told him; on his right temple there's the unmistakable glow of an LED.

Then, she kisses him.

Slowly but surely, tongue visibly all over his mouth. He kisses her back but she's not paying attention. Her eyes remain fixed on Daniel's as she bites on the other android's lower lip. An open provocation; punishment.

Daniel feels a cloud of static buzz at the centre of his chest and move downwards to his lower abdomen, and then some. With a couple strides Emma is within grasping distance, and that's what he does; he grabs her wrist and yanks her away from the android, who fumbles on his feet.

"Whoa, man, easy," the pierced android says. "We were just having fun. This your brother or something?" He looks at Daniel from top to bottom.

"Not at all," Emma raises her voice barely over the background noise.

"Emma, we're leaving." Daniel speaks in a grave tone he's never liked to use.

When the blonde android with the disgusting piercings and an even more disgusting smirk snatches Emma away from him and presses his lips to her neck in defiance, something inside Daniel snaps.

He sees his hand clench into a fist and shoot towards the guy's face. The bridge of his nose cracks under the hit, and a trail of blue blood starts dripping from his drilled nostrils.

"OW! You motherfucking...!"

The android answers with a hit of his own that Daniel barely dodges, and then another that manages to land in his jaw.

The fight doesn't last very long. After receiving a couple of forehands and landing some others, Daniel kicks the other android in the groin, making him lose his footing just enough for him to knock him over with a push. The battered android raises a hand but Daniel slaps it away and launches his foot again, this time directed at his adversary's chest.

The android spews thirium out of his mouth and makes a strained sound. Daniel could have gone on, could have smashed him to pieces right then and there, but he doesn't -Emma is grabbing his arm and weighing it down with all her might.

"Stop! Stop it!" he hears her cry out. Why hasn't he heard her until now?

Daniel seems to come back to his senses from his almost murderous trance state. Around them, people have turned to watch the scene. Luckily for them, the illegal gathering has hired no security agents, but the probability of someone having alerted the police is enough to bring Daniel back to the ground again. He grabs Emma's arm and pulls her through the crowd and out of the warehouse, still pulsing with the vibrations of the electronic music playing inside.

The automatic cab Daniel called before entering the building is waiting for them across the road. Emma lets Daniel push her inside with little resistance and falls on the back seat heavily. The android follows and gives the cab GPS their address with a touch on a panel.

"What were you thinking about, Emma?!" he scolds her. "What do you think could have happened in that filthy place?"

Emma squirms in her seat but she shouts back at him.

"I wanted to forget about myself and let go for once. I wanted to be desired. I wanted to _feel_ something, Daniel! I'm not sure that's something you can relate to."

Daniel ignores the venom in her last words. She's hurt and by now he knows she is capable of being cruel when she is. Not even the android is free from the dark influx of intense emotions. He recalls his overly-vicious aggression on the android back at the party and flinches.

"And that's why you put yourself in danger so recklessly? Emma, you don't know the ways of the world. You don't know the kind of people that lurk in those places. You could have been taken advantage of. He could have-"

"What if that's exactly what I was looking for, Daniel? What if I _wanted_ him to give me what you won't?"

There's a pressure building up around Daniel's chest in a way that wouldn't allow him to draw a deep breath if he were to. His vision blurs at the edges; everything is out of focus, except for her.

"I'd do anything for you, I always have, but this..."

She's asking him to indulge her fantasies but there's no possible way that's what she really wants. Not old, clunky Daniel, with his outdated technology and overprotectiveness. Not an unstable PL600 with a chunk of plastic for a heart.

She's in love with the only thing she's ever known. And it's because Daniel cursed her with loneliness the night he snatched her away from her dysfunctional but true, flesh-and-bone family, away from the chance of having a normal life forever. He cheated her out of normalcy and happiness and now she thinks herself in love. Stockholm syndrome in all but name, which he has been feeding unknowingly for the past eight years.

However, he can't just reject her again. He won't be able to bear to see her break into pieces. And there's a growing discomfort at the back of his throat that won't go away either, something he's been desperately trying to deny day after day. Daniel hates lies, so he settles for a half-truth.

"You already know I love you more than anything, Emma. Isn't that enough for you?"

The girl's lips twitch.

"It used to be. Now I need more."

Deep inside Daniel's core, he has started to admit he does too.

"You're all I have," Emma lifts her knees to the seat and rests her weight on them, as well as her hands, leaning forward, trapping the android between the car window and her pleading face, "all I've known. All I am, I owe to you. My protector, my best friend."

“That’s precisely why this is wrong. I can’t be your whole world.”

“But you are. And don’t be mistaken -I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Emma crawls towards him. Daniel's optical units see it all; the passing streetlights illuminating sharp collarbones, damp strands of hair falling over desiring eyes, the moist glint of half-parted lips.

"I'm not a child. I am aware of that and I can choose. And you've never been a babysitter. You always were something… else."

There's barely a hair's breadth between them now. Daniel can count her every eyelash and the loud beats of her racing heart.

She's said so herself: she wants him because her world spins around him like moths circle the streetlamps in summer nights. Why does that horrifying certainty make Daniel shudder the wrong way? Why does it send his blue blood rushing through his circuits to be aware of the twisted bond they share?

Emma wipes something off the corner of his mouth with her thumb. Blue blood that hasn't evaporated yet after Daniel's fight in the warehouse. She brings her finger to her mouth and sucks it clean. Daniel's mechanical reflexes try to gulp down the suffocating lump in his throat. In his mind, hundreds of software warnings pile on top of each other.

"Mmmm... Tastes bitter." she giggles, and bends forward.

Her tongue ghosts along his chin, and then goes all the way up to his lower lip, where the thirium-dripping crack is. Daniel's obsolete system takes longer than it should to repair even those small scratches. But the wounds are bottom on his priority list right now. His processors are going crazy registering the movement of Emma’s tongue as she licks the blue blood off his mouth, then closing her eyes and pressing her soft lips against his in a chaste kiss that only lasts so long before she pulls away and looks at him, waiting.

_> >E r r o r._

_This is wrong. It's not supposed to be this way._

_> >Relati0nship s.tatus: F4mily??__

_I’m not supposed to want this. But this will make her happy. This will make me happy._

Daniel's hand wavers as it reaches out.

_My girl. My Emma. My love._

Has he said that out loud, he wonders. His hand finally finds the nape of Emma's neck and pulls her close against everything his logical thought processes are telling him, and then the motion stops.

_What am I so afraid of?_

"Please, Daniel," her voice is but a whisper. "I know you want me too." Her shallow breath brushes against his synthetic skin.

He definitely shouldn’t be wanting this, aching for this as much as he is.

Daniel's eyelids drop when his mouth touches hers. Wary, at first, cautious. He's never done this before. Dozens of film scenes dance at the back of his processors. He's analysed the patterns of movement of humans during intimacy before -out of sheer curiosity, he had told himself- but all of it becomes white noise when his pressure sensors actually feel it for themselves. The softness of her, the faint smell of sweat and the flowery perfume she's wearing. But Emma's caramel scent is dwarfed by how sweet she _tastes_ as Daniel makes his way into her mouth and explores the sharp tip of her teeth, the inner border of the round lips that are now kissing him back, needy, hungry. He thinks about how he hasn’t had any preferences regarding flavours until now; he’ll have to reconsider.

_> > Pr0tocol E r 4 o r_

He blinks away the error messages piling up at the sides of his vision at the same time Emma pulls away briefly to breathe. Her sharp, clipped exhalation brushes against Daniel’s cheek and she wraps her arms around his neck.

The cab pulls off slowly in front of the apartment block. Daniel and Emma stop their messy kissing to exit the vehicle. Daniel lays Emma’s coat over her, the one she has been wearing tied to her waist until now, and embraces her all the way up their flat. The system warnings keep pestering him and he enables a command that closes them automatically as they pop up.

The door has barely closed behind them when she stands on her tiptoes and leans in with her full weight. 116 lbs, perfectly balanced over his shoulders, against his chest. He can feel her own rising and falling rapidly, soft against his, and she crushes her lips against him again, working from his neck up.

_WARNING. Overheating._

_WARNING. Ventilation protocols insufficient._

_ >> Increasing artificial respiration frequency_

His overwhelmed pressure processors barely notice her hand snaking under his pullover while the other one tangles in his hair and pulls him deeper into her heated embrace.

At some point her feet lift from the tile and he grabs her thighs, carrying her down the corridor as their mouths desperately search for each other. When they reach the door of his bedroom, he leans forward so she can rest her weight on the floor, and pushes her against the wall. She gasps for air and he takes some time to adjust his jumbled vocal module.

“Is this what you want?” he asks in a whisper.

Emma holds him in place with a fistful of his blonde hair in her fingers and groans in his ear. “More than anything in the world.”

The door creaks open and the two entangled figures storm in, a disarray of desiring hands wanting to feel each other wholly.

Daniel lowers Emma until she’s resting on his single bed -barely big enough for two, but she’s slender, and her head feels heavy and light at the same time on his hands, and he’s so desperate to lean his body over her…

She drags her hands over the bedsheets, raising them until they’re resting at the sides of her head, looking tantalizingly helpless. Her eyeliner is all smudged and there’s barely a hint of the purple lipstick on her mouth. Daniel places his thighs at both sides of her hips and holds her wrists in place with his hands. There’s a dark swirl of emotion inside of him, a feral desire of protection turned into possession and control.

Daniel shakes away the embarrassment that comes from remembering the ‘special hardware’ John had bought alongside the PL600 house assistant model, back when he wouldn’t have cared about being used in whatever way his owners had in mind. It never came to that, though, and the accessory has never functioned. The corresponding software is already included in his core coding, though, and it will only take a moment to be brought forth so he can use the proper commands…

“Give me a moment,” he whispers, and covers her cheeks in kisses, moving down to her neck. Emma’s quiet whimpering makes his thirium regulators jump.

Daniel throws his head back for a moment, in an attempt to clear his head before the procedures are ready.

It’s a mistake.

The disembodied head of an unknown android pierces through him with its glassy, thousand-yard stare. He forgot completely about it after the long day and abandoned him on his desk, an improvised worktable. Thirium has pooled under it and the spare arts around it and now it’s dried, giving the impression that someone has knocked off a blue bucket of paint on that corner of Daniel’s room, leaving gruesome stains all around. He can’t see it but he knows that, under the desk, inside of his ragged bag, a certain amount of similarly grim disjointed pieces are waiting for him to tend to them.

In his hot, blissful haze, Daniel has forgotten the one thing that makes his circuits churn in self-loathing the most. But he remembers now, vividly, flashes of images blurring his vision. His hands are stained deep blue, the gruesome splatters reaching up to his elbows. There’s the familiar screeching of scrap metal being sawed off, wires being cut and welded together, and an agonizing clipped scream for mercy, merged with the bitter shouting of a couple in the kitchen.

_We’re ruined! You have ruined us!_

A disfigured android occupies Daniel’s field of view and talks in a jarred voice; its unhinged jaw sways, threatening to fall off.

“Is something the matter?” the mutilated head says, and it changes into Emma’s delicate, flushed features all of a sudden. Her big blue eyes look at him from below; her plump lips are slightly agape, shiny with Daniel’s artificial, thirium-based spit and her own. His hands are still holding her down by her wrists, instead of gripping synthetic fibre mesh and plastic, and underneath there’s the softness of the mattress and sheets, like Emma’s skin under the blurry silver light of the moon -all white and perfect and immaculate.

Disgust unravels at the back of Daniel’s throat and dribbles down, choking him. He doesn’t deserve this, any of it. Most of all, Emma doesn’t deserve it.

“It… hurts,” she whines. Daniel loosens the grip on Emma immediately; without noticing, his synthetic skin had retracted from his fingers because of the pressure they were forcing around the girl’s tiny joints, and had left a reddened mark where they grabbed her. The slick sound of the nanobots covering the hard plastic again is drowned out by his stutter.

“I’m sorry. I’m…”

_She mustn’t see._

Daniel springs out of the bed, trembling limbs failing to respond correctly. He scoops a frowning Emma from the mattress and places her gently on the corridor, just outside of the room.

“I love you. I’m sorry.”

He places one last kiss on her half-parted lips and, unable to bear her disconcerted, broken-hearted expression in front of him any longer, closes the door and locks himself inside.

Daniel holds his head between his hands, shutting down the error messages and intimate protocols that have activated in the last minutes, and stays unmoving in the centre of the room until he hears the faint sound of Emma’s door closing as well.

He’s fucked up bad. He never minded being an outcast, a despicable scavenger that cut his brethren’s lives short in order to make the scrap dealers and himself a profit, as long as that meant he could keep Emma safe by his side, but he’s always abhorred the day she might come to know what he does. The same dirty business John Phillips used to do, only aggravated by the fact that androids now were, under everything that matters, very much sentient and alive.

He’s convinced that it’s better this way, pushing her away from a worthless ragpicker, a graverobber, a murderer. He’ll find comfort in knowing she would hate him for shutting her out, rather than becoming the same kind of monster her father was.

The thought, though logical, is difficult to come to terms to, and copious droplets of optical maintenance liquid fall down his cheeks without a pause for the rest of the night as he picks up his work where he left it. Six said they might be out of business soon. Daniel will cut all loose ends, make one last delivery and be free.

Perhaps then he’ll gather the courage to look Emma in the eyes again.


End file.
